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The Glory of Kings: A Festschrift for James B. Jordan
Fyodor Dostoevsky
(Christian Encounters Series)
Athanasius
(Foundations of Theological Exegesis and Christian Spirituality)
The Four: A Survey of the Gospels
Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom
From Behind the Veil: The Epistles of John
Deep Exegesis:The Mystery of Reading Scripture
1 & 2 Kings
Brazos Theological Commentary
The Promise Of His Appearing: An Exposition Of Second Peter
A Great Mystery: Fourteen Wedding Sermons
Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, And Hope In Western Literature
Miniatures & Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen
The Priesthood of the Plebs: A Theology of Baptism
A Son To Me: An Exposition of 1 & 2 Samuel
From Silence to Song: The Davidic Liturgical Revolution
Ascent to Love: A Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy
Blessed Are the Hungry: Meditations on the Lord's Supper
A House For My Name: A Survey of the Old Testament
Heroes of the City of Man: A Christian Guide to Select Ancient Literature
Brightest Heaven of Invention: A Christian Guide To Six Shakespeare Plays
Wise Words: Family Stories That Bring the Proverbs to Life
The Kingdom and the Power: Rediscovering the Centrality of the Church
Given the sharp separation of spheres between men and women in 19th-century America, one would not expect women to play much of a role in the expansion of American power. Empire-building was man’s work, while women tended the heart-fires back home. In an award-winning 1998 article (pointed out to me by my colleague Chris Schlect), Amy Kaplan showed that the spheres were not divided in this fashion, that imperial symbols and rhetoric were employed in American discussions of domesticity, and that Americans played off the fact that “domesticity” had both a familial and a national connotation (as in “domestic policy”). Kaplan found it curious that domesticity was valorized at the very time that American embarked on a frantic expansive policy across the American continent. The two movements seem to be connected. (If nothing else, Kaplan’s title, “Manifest Domesticity,” deserves an award all by itself.)
Recent work, Kaplan acknowledged, had already deconstructed the two–sphere ideology by showing that “the private feminized that space of the home both infused and bolstered the public male arena of the market, and that the sentimental attached to maternal influence values were used to sanction women’s entry into the wider civic realm from which those same values theoretically excluded them.” Yet, “this deconstruction structural of separate spheres, however, leaves another opposition intact: the domestic in intimate opposition to the foreign.” She proposed that we more accurately capture the 19th-century mentality if we place “domestic” in opposition to “foreign” in addition to its opposition to “political” or “public.”
She also proposed that the boundary of foreign and domestic was too static:
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, February 7, 2012 at 5:35 am
Methodist minister George S. Phillips said during the civil war that “Our mission . . . should only be accomplished when the last despot should be dethroned, the last claim of oppression broken, the dignity and equality of redeemed humanity everywhere established, and the American flag . . . should wave over every land and encircle the world with its majesttic folds. Then, and not till then, should the nation have accomplished the purpose for which it was established by the God of heaven.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, January 12, 2012 at 5:12 pm
In his World of Faith and Freedom: Why International Religious Liberty Is Vital to American National Security
Farr thinks this not only unjust to religious minorities in Saudia Arabia (he estimates there are 500,000-1 million Catholics, mostly Filipino servants and other South Asians; almost no priests). He thinks it shows that the Bush administration didn’t learn the lesson of 9/11: “The birthplace of Islam, of Wahhabism, and its stepchild Bin Ladenism was left to evolve on its own. Although there were a few hopeful signs of political and theological movement in the desert kingdom, there was among American officials no sense of urgency about encouraging that movement. The belief that U.S. support for despots in the Middle East had helped spawn Islamist transnational terrorism, and that the long-term antidote was stable self-government, was swamped by the season of ‘realism’ that once against descended on American foreign policy.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, January 12, 2012 at 2:31 pm
A fragment:
Wilfred McClay has observed that despite our reputation as extroverted materialists, Americans have a strong introspective streak.[1] That is not surprising in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, when the United States has attained a world supremacy unmatched by any country in history. Power, as Richard Neuhaus pointed out long ago, is not self-justifying, and the enormous power that we now hold requires some explanation. Norwegians, Neuhaus surmised, spend relatively little time reflecting on the meaning of Norwegianness, but that is because Norway makes far less of a claim on history or on the world’s attention. We are introspective because we want to convince ourselves that the power we hold is somehow right – not that we necessarily have a right to such power, but that it has at least enough legitimacy to allow us to use it. We need to convince ourselves that there is justice in empire.[2]
Even when the power of the American colonies was pathetically tiny, even when the republican system was truly in an experimental – that is to say, an undecided – state, Americans devoted time and energy to reflecting on the character of America, its role in history, its standing among the nations.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, January 11, 2012 at 5:40 am
Charles Adams (Those Dirty Rotten taxes: The Tax Revolts that Built America
This, Adams thinks, accounts for the savagery of the war, which is summarizes in a sobering paragraph: “It has been difficult for many Civil War students to fathom why the northern states would sacrifice so much money and blood to conquer the South and force them to remain in the federal Union. It seems especially strange for a people who believed in government by consent to want to force on another people a government against their consent. And force they used, of monstrous proportions that shocked the civilized world. This was no minor military encounter. To take away from the southern people their right of self-determination, there had to be a massive destruction of life, of cities, of towns and villages, of farms and private homes – almost a total annihilation of the social order. Europeans looked upon this aghast, and reasoned that the Americans must have learned this kind of warfare from the native Indians, certainly not from their European roots. Napoleon was a kindly gentleman compared to Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, January 2, 2012 at 2:53 pm
Chief Justice Rehnquist wrote in support of laws that ban flag-burning: “The flag is not simply another ‘idea’ or ‘point of view’ competing for recognition in the marketplace of ideas. Millions of millions of Americans regard it with an almost mystical reverence regardless of what sort of social, political, or philosophical belief they may have. I cannot agree that the First Amendment invalidates the Act of Congress, and the laws of 48 of the 50 states, which make criminal the public burning of the flag.”
One oddity, one glaring oversight. The oddity: Rehnquist did not describe America’s diversity in religion, only in “social, political, and philosophical belief.” How often do Americans divide over “philosophical beliefs”?
The glaring oversight: By Rehnquist’s own argument, it would seem that the Establishment clause would prohibit protection to the flag. How does a ban on flag-burning not amount to an establishment of a “mystical” flag-cult? I suspect that the question would not occur to Rehnquist, since patriotism doesn’t qualify as a religion – even if he cannot avoid religious language in describing it. Yet he seems to half-recognize that the US does in fact have an established religion, whose sacrament is the flag and whose creed is the Declaration of Independence.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, December 29, 2011 at 12:32 pm
In War and the American Difference: Theological Reflections on Violence and National Identity
But the Protestantism that has taken shape in America undermines itself: “we may be living at a time when we are watching Protestantism, at least the kind of Protestantism we have in America, come to an end. It is dying of its own success. Protestantism became identified with the republican presumption in liberty as an end reinforced by belief in the common sense of the individual. As a result Protestant churches in America lost the ability to maintain the disciplines necessary to sustain a people capable of being an alternative to the world.” The Religious Right seems to stand in opposition to the world, but the appearance is deceiving: To the extent that the Religious Right promotes “faith as a necessary condition for supporting democracy,” to that extent “the faith sustained in not the Christian faith.”
Some will be surprised at Hauerwas’s declaration, “I love America and I love being an American.” But he goes on to say, “I cannot avoid the reality that American Christianity has been less than it should have been just to the extent that the church has failed to distinguish America’s god from the God we worship as Christians.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, December 29, 2011 at 11:55 am
Harry Stout’s Upon the Altar of the Nation: A Moral History of the Civil War
Sherman’s own views were expressed in a response to an earlier massacre: “We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women, and children.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, December 29, 2011 at 8:16 am
Wilfred McClay has neatly summarized the creed, scriptures, sacraments, and sacred places and times of America’s civil religion: “The same mix of convictions can be found animating the rhetoric of the American Revolution, the vision of Manifest Destiny, the crusading sentiments of antebellum abolitionists, the benevolent imperialism of fin-de-siecle apostles of Christian civilization, and the fervent idealism of President Woodrow Wilson at the time of World War I. No one expressed the idea more directly, however, than Senator Albert J. Beveridge of Indiana, who told the United States Senate, in the wake of the Spanish-American War, that ‘God has marked us as His chosen people, henceforth to lead in the regeneration of the world.’”
“The American civil religion also has its sacred scriptures, such as the Mayflower Compact, the Declaration, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Gettysburg Address, and the Pledge of Allegiance. It has its great narratives of struggle, from the suffering of George Washington’s troops at Valley Forge to the gritty valor of Jeremiah Denton in Hanoi. It has its special ceremonial and memorial occasions, such as the Fourth of July, Veterans Day, Memorial Day, Thanksgiving Day, and Martin Luther King Day. It has its temples, shrines, and holy sites, such as the Lincoln Memorial, the National Mall, the Capitol, the White House, Arlington National Cemetery, Civil War battlefields, and great natural landmarks such as the Grand Canyon. It has its sacred objects, notably the national flag. It has its organizations, such as the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the American Legion, the Daughters of the American Revolution, and the Boy Scouts. And it has its dramatis personae, chief among them being its military heroes and the long succession of presidents. Its telltale marks can be found in the frequent resort to the imagery of the Bible and reference to God and Providence in speeches, public documents, and patriotic songs, as well as in the inclusion of God’s name in the national motto (‘In God We Trust’) on all currency.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, December 28, 2011 at 2:46 pm
Berry again, waxing prophetic, and thanks again to Ken Myers.
“In denying the holiness of the body and of the so-called physical reality of the world—and in denying support to the good economy, the good work, by which alone the Creation can receive due honor—modern Christianity generally has cut itself off from both nature and culture. It has no serious or competent interest in biology or ecology. And it is equally uninterested in the arts by which humankind connects itself to nature. It manifests no awareness of the specifically Christian cultural lineages that connect us to our past. There is, for example, a splendid heritage of Christian poetry in English that most church members live and die without reading or hearing or hearing about. Most sermons are preached without any awareness at all that the making of sermons is an art that has at times been magnificent. Most modern churches look like they were built by robots without reference to the heritage of church architecture or respect for the place; they embody no awareness that work can be worship. Most religious music now attests to the general assumption that religion is no more than a vaguely pious (and vaguely romantic) emotion.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, December 22, 2011 at 11:55 am
Senator Albert Beveridge described our mission in 1898: “God has . . . made us the master organizers of the world to establish system where chaos reigns. He has given us the spirit of progress to overwhelm the forces of reaction throughout the earth. He has made us adept in government that we may administer government among svage and senile peoples. Were it not for such a force as this the world would relapse into barbarism and night. And of all our race He has marked the American people as His chosen nation to finally lead in the regeneration of the world. This is the divine mission of America, and it holds for us al the profit, all the glory, all the happiness possible to man.”
Beveridge wasn’t all religious fervor. In an uncannily Leninist vein, he added: “American factories are making more than the American people can use. American soil is producing more than they can consume. Fate has written our policy for us; the trade of the world must and shall be ours. . . . We will cover the ocean with our merchant marine. We will build a navy to the measure of our greatness.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, December 20, 2011 at 4:26 pm
Schmemann says that the distinctive mark of the converted Roman Empire, and of the Byzantine order, was the “state’s” acknowledgement that the end of the church was the end of all things, also then the end of the state. The state no longer existed to promote its own ends, but to serve the end of the kingdom of heaven.
When the eschatology changes, the whole political system changes. When America was founded on the conviction that it represented the novus ordo saeclorum, it abandoned the political eschatology of Western Christendom and Byzantium both. Instead of promoting the transcendent and genuinely eschatological end of the kingdom of God, a nation founded as the new order of the ages can only promote itself.
In American political eschatology, we are the already. The rest of the world is the not yet. And here we come.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, December 15, 2011 at 2:21 pm
In a 2009 essay in Political Theology, Jamie Smith notes the difference between libertarian freedom and the Augustinian notion of freedom to pursue and do the Good. He puts the matter starkly: Quoting David Burrell, he argues that libertarian freedom “demands ‘that a free agent parallel a creator ex nihilo. What the Christian (and Jewish and Muslim) theological tradition ascribes to the Creator, modern libertarian accounts of freedom ascribe to creatures.” He adds that “to affirm libertarian non-teleological auto-sovereignty . . . requires rejecting the Creator – or, at least, rejecting the theological claim that there is a determinate Good for human freedom which is specified by the Creator; in other words, it requires rejecting anything more than a deist creator.” The “Creator” invoked in American public statements must be the deist creator, since the freedom he underwrites is a freedom without any determinate telos.
The usual way to deflect such a theological critique of modern political freedom – from both the left and the right – is to distinguish different senses of freedom. In liberal order, individuals and “mediating” communities pursue their own substantive ends; no such end determinate end is allowed for the polity as a whole, since that would endanger the freedom of lesser communities to pursue their own ends.
This argument has a certain power, but it ultimately fails in various ways.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, December 8, 2011 at 11:43 am
In his 1995 Foreordained Failure: The Quest for a Constitutional Principle of Religious Freedom
There’s the religious freedom of the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, . . .
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Saturday, November 12, 2011 at 1:17 pm
What is modern politics? Kahn describes it as “a distinctive form of religious experience” that depends on the shift of sovereignty (Schmitt) from the monarch to the people. When the miraculous of sovereignty shifts, so does sacrifice:
“The domain of sacrifice shifted [in modern politics] from that of religious resistance to the state to that of political patriotism. Modern stories of sacrifice are less likely to be of religious resistance to the state than of individuals whose faith in the ‘truth’ of the state – the popular sovereign – fuels an ultimate resistance against those who make ‘false’ claims to represent the people. For Americans, Lincoln becomes the great image of the martyr – a politicized Christ. Martin Luther King, Jr., too is celebrated not for his adherence to a religious claim to truth in resistance to the state, but as a sacrificial patriot in the Lincolnesque tradition.” As Hauerwas points out in his recent War and the American Difference: Theological Reflections on Violence and National Identity
Kahn pushes further to point out the 20th century was not, as often believed, a secular age, but “was marked by the magnitude of its faith, and even by the extreme character of the sacrificial demand made by political communities of ultimate belief. Western nation-states became grand institutional structures for the sacrifice of their citizens to the idea of the necessity of the state’s continued existence. Only under such an idea can we begin to make sense of the millions sacrificed on the battlefields of Europe, let along the extension of the battlefield to the entire territory of the state. The modern state coopts the act of sacrifice to its own ultimate end, which is only the continued existence of the popular sovereign.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, October 20, 2011 at 1:00 pm
In his provocative 2005 study, Putting Liberalism in Its Place
Liberal theory cannot grasp the foundational character of sacrifice, nor can it grasp “the erotic character of the experience of political meaning.” Kahn means that “attachment to the political community is a matter not of contract but of love.” He clarifies that he is not advocating a new politics grounded in sacrifice and love, but rather showing that “our politics is already one of love and sacrifice; reason finds its place within this experience of self and polity.”
He makes his point about the limits of liberal theory with a theological analogy: It’s not enough for believers to attend to the content of God’s speaking; of equal importance is the fact that God speaks. Similarly, “liberal theorists . . . focus on the content of the speech [of the popular sovereign], that is, on what the sovereign said or should say. They do not reflect on the significance of the belief that it is the popular sovereign who does the speaking.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, October 19, 2011 at 3:43 pm
Let’s assume that the Eucharist makes a political difference.
And let’s observe that the predominate Christian tradition of the US has been a-Eucharistic.
Then we must ask, What political difference has that made?
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, October 18, 2011 at 5:49 pm
Without American missionaries, no Transcendentalism, says Mead (almost):
“Missionary endeavors to translate the sacred writings of other faiths into English may have been for the purposes of arming Westerners for religious controversy with the heathens, but the ideas of those texts quickly found a place in American thought. Emerson and Thoreau read Hindu scriptures, and their thought, and the development of American intellectual life, was deeply influenced by these ideas.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, July 11, 2011 at 6:44 pm
Gedicks again, on the claim that the Establishment Clause requires the government to remain neutral between “religion and irreligion” and between “belief and unbelief”:
“This dictum, present at the birth of contemporary Establishment Clause doctrine inthe Everson case in 1947, is my personal candidate for the most frequently invoked incoherent constitutional rule. I mean, really, what sense can one possibly make ofa rule that requires the government to remain neutral between a proposition and its negation? One may agree or disagree about what it could mean to be ‘neutral’ between various religions, but it is at least possible to have a sensible conversation about this. By contrast, there has always been something decidedly weird about the requirement that the government be neutral between religion and nonreligion, or belief and unbelief. Indeed, the requirement seems to constitute empirical proof that even the dumbest things can start to make sense if they’re repeated often enough.”
He elaborates, at length and amusingly:
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, July 1, 2011 at 8:38 am
In a 2006 article in the William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal, Frederick Mark Gedicks points out the impotence of civil religion in a pluralist society:
“The irony of civil religion is that it is supposed to provide a substitute for theestablished church, a means of morally instructing and spiritually unifying the peopleso as to bind them to republican government. Yet, in a radically plural society likethe United States, like most of the countries of Western Europe, there is no set ofreligious beliefs that is both sufficiently broad to command the assent of most citizensand, at the same time, sufficiently deep to contain serious theological content.” He is skeptical, as am I, that a pluralist society can have a civil religion with any meaningful content to it.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, July 1, 2011 at 8:35 am
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